


Visiting Hours

by kataurah



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Introspection, POV Outsider, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-15 23:46:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16942986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kataurah/pseuds/kataurah
Summary: Five conversations Marcus Kane won't remember having, and one he'll never forget.





	1. Clarke

**Author's Note:**

> So it's been a while, and this has been sitting unfinished for several months, so I thought instead of posting it all at once, I'd post each segment as a chapter in the hope that it will motivate me to finish. Maybe then I might feel like putting the rest of my stories back up, but we'll see, I suppose. I hope you'll all still read and like this one, anyway. Thanks in advance x

"I never got a chance to thank you."

  
Clarke feels a strange mix of awkwardness and deep sadness as she watches the unconscious man before her. Her feelings about Marcus Kane have been many and wildly varied throughout her life, as far back as she can remember. In her childhood he was an intimidating, stern presence that commanded any room he entered (unless that room was already occupied by her mother, she thinks with a small, wry smile.) He gave off a general cold demeanour, his smiles few and fleeting whenever she saw her father manage to coax one from him. It still stuns her, knowing the man he is now, the sheer capacity of feeling that he kept hidden, suppressed, in order to do his job. She used to think him heartless, but Clarke knows now, all too well, the burden and sacrifice of making decisions in the name of survival. She understands having to do what needs to be done regardless of how she might _feel_ about it, and knows now that Kane never took the loss of human life lightly. He carries the weight of every one taken, just as she does.

  
What was that old Earth idiom? Still waters run deep? No, she doesn't want to think of the Earth right now. She doesn't want to think about how, out of all of them, Earth changed Marcus Kane for the better, made him kinder, softer, more hopeful, rather than the way it has hardened Clarke and stripped her of her faith in humanity, in doing the right thing rather than the necessary thing.

She envies him that.

  
He is a good man, a good leader who sometimes reminds her of Lexa in his vision and drive to build a peaceful future for them all, not just his own people. And he loves her mother unquestionably and completely.

  
"I never thanked you for taking care of her when I couldn't be there."

  
She knows he'd have done it whether Clarke was there or not - as if anything but death could have possibly kept him away, she _knows_ \- but she feels like she needs to say it, to acknowledge it. They all went through hell down in that bunker, but her mother suffered an entirely different sort of her own creation too; fought an internal battle that wore her down from the inside out. Clarke only had a taste of what it was like to helplessly watch Abby struggle and it still lingers, bitter and sharp, like bile in the back of her throat. She can only imagine what it must have been like for Kane to watch the woman he loves slowly deteriorating before his very  
eyes.

  
"I know you did everything you could -" Her voice catches, surprising herself. "Mom told me what you did, why you both ran from Octavia, how she thought -" Ah, that was why her throat was fast becoming clogged and her eyes burned. "How she thought she got you killed too."

Grief wells up uncontrollably within Clarke when she thinks about how Jake Griffin died over a hundred and thirty years ago, and, at this point, the only evidence that he ever existed at all lies in her, and the only other two people left that knew him: in her mother and Marcus Kane... Who are now basically married in all but official terms. It's all so tragically ridiculous that for a moment Clarke is afraid she's about to have a giggling fit at the bedside of a coma patient, which - because she's twisted and messed up - somehow just makes her want to laugh even more. She doesn't think Kane would mind, really; he'd probably just be glad to see her laugh. That promptly sobers her up.

  
"She's trying to save you now," She says, imploring, "You guys save each other; that's what you do." In truth, Clarke knows that in saving Kane, her mother is saving herself; Abby hasn't said it, of course she hasn't, but her hope would die with him. Clarke can't help but think about the overdose that may or may not have been an accident, relapse that - right now - would be all too easy and, worse, understandable. Her stomach feels leaden with cold dread.

"She told me..." Clarke knows Abby laid all the guilt on herself when she talked about the dark year; she knows because it's what she would have done too. "She told me that you know all the worst things about her and -" Her words become strained, "and that you love her anyway." Given his past she thinks that surely must go both ways: love unconditional. It's quite a thing to behold.

  
Somewhere deep down inside Clarke, a tiny glimmer of faith that she thought long extinguished resonates with the kind of power that love imbues, and she wills Marcus Kane to hold on with every fibre of her being.

  
"This isn't how this ends."


	2. Diyoza

"I'm going to die of old age waiting for you to wake up, Kane, and I'm over two hundred years old."

Diyoza shifts in her seat; it's a crappy fold-out metal chair that a heavily pregnant woman hasn't a hope in hell of getting comfortable in, but she'll be here for the next few hours nonetheless.

Someone at least thought to give her a pillow. Abby, probably, unless it's hers to begin with. Kane's not-wife practically lives at his bedside, alternating between working, waiting and sleeping; rarely eating but not exactly behaving like a weeping war widow either. No, her grief is devastatingly quiet whilst she works herself into exhaustion. It's in the white-knuckled clenching of her fingers and the pallor of her skin, offsetting the dark rings beneath dull eyes. It's how Diyoza knows she's aching for the oblivion her pills would provide just so she wouldn't have to feel _this_.

The only reason Abby's not here now is because her daughter managed to finally talk her into sleeping for a couple of hours in a real bed, under the condition that other people will sit and watch over Kane.

"I don't want him to wake up alone," was what Diyoza had heard her say, the words weighed down with the same aching longing with which she watches him, day in, day out.

Diyoza has never before let herself love anyone that much; never left herself open to the kind of life-shattering vulnerability that can result in it's loss. She already knows though, with a certainty she feels down to her bones, that this child will change that. It - _she_ \- already has. Diyoza never thought herself to be the maternal sort (she supposes she never allowed herself to find out, given the testosterone fuelled environments she's lived and fought in for most of her life) but she loves her daughter with a fierceness that is at once completely foreign yet familiar to her. Ferocity is something that has defined her, driven her and fuels her in everything she  
does. If a cause isn't something she can dedicate herself to completely, it can't be worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

This child - her daughter - is Diyoza's new cause.

It's a cause both Kane and Abby have already pledged their support to, she thinks, as her eyes return to regard him again; there's no change, but the rise and fall of his chest, the steady beep of his pulse on the monitor, provides reassurance. Comfort, even.

"Won't be much longer before the kid'll be here, you know, and I'd quite like you to meet her." Perhaps she should feel like this is pointless, having this one-sided conversation, but she's grown used to talking _at_ him when he was angry and unresponsive. "You named her, after all."

_Hope_. Diyoza places a protective hand over the round of her belly, considering how grateful she is, really... How _strange_ it is that she's come to trust Kane and Abby to help her in this. There isn't a single sonofabitch amongst her crew that she'd have trusted to be at the birth. McCreary wouldn't have harmed his child, but Diyoza doesn't doubt that he'd have killed her once the kid was no longer inside her.

She trusts them; hell, she _respects_ them, because she knows now how wrong she was in her first assessment of them. The traitor and the junkie. They've impressed her in a lot of ways since then; now that Abby's clean, Diyoza feels almost compelled to make sure she stays that way, to do what Kane would want until he's there to support her himself.

And if he never is, if he doesn't wake up... Well, she'll do her damndest anyway. Not because she owes Kane anything - she tells herself she doesn't - but because Abby put herself between Diyoza's child and a bullet. She was ready to potentially sacrifice herself to save both of them, so Diyoza will try to save Abby if she needs saving. If she can. If Abby _wants_ to be saved.

"Shit, this is depressing," she mutters aloud, starting to grimace against the growing ache in her back before it turns into a smile when Hope kicks directly against her palm, where it still rests on her belly. An honest-to-God, genuine smile, small and secret but hers to share with her daughter alone. Eligius IV doesn't have an observation window in the medical bay, but Abby and Clarke had moved and set up enough equipment for Kane to rest in a room with a view, though it obviously benefits his visitors rather than him right now. If Diyoza cranes her neck a little to her right, she can see the sprawling heavenly body of the planet beneath them. It glows vibrantly in the corner of her eye, and all of a sudden she feels the way she did standing in that field with Kane as he shared his vision with her.

"We can still build it." She turns back to him with a ridiculous, fleeting expectation, brought on by the flare of hope burning in her chest, that she'll find him looking back at her. Of course he isn't, but there is no disappointment. Charmaine Diyoza's conviction and ferocity won't be contained, not even by the sadness that lingers for the loss of her home. "There's a brave new world down there, Kane, and it's about time you woke the hell up to see it."


End file.
